A tool for members of Jax Freestyle Book Club, a meetup.com group in Jacksonville, Florida, to talk about what they're reading and would like to read. Click on the meetup badge to the right to go to our meeting homepage.

Friday, February 1, 2008

The Bookseller of Kabul

A penpal friend of mine wrote this after I told him I was reading this book.
Something to add to the discussion on Tuesday?
The ethics of jounalists. I'll be thinking about trust as I'm reading this book. I haven't picked up the book from the library yet but I will this weekend.


begin forward:
I think this book illustrates an interesting phenomenon. The amount of misuse of people´s trust that journalists think is ok. Seierstad, a norwegian woman journalist, used a family in Kabul, Afghanistan, to further her own career. The bookseller got very angry, he wrote a counter-book. He even travelled to Norway to show that Seierstad is a moral swine. What, to me, is interesting is the following: how much is it ok for an emancipated women, a really good woman (in her own eyes), to consciously misuse other people? In the interest of your own career? She sold out everyone in the family who let her live with them. That was her way of paying back for the generosity she had used. She looks herself in the mirror each morning and she feels no shame. She consciously misused the family. Reflect on what gave her that moral right. She is not stupid in terms of brain power. She is a journalist. She did not care about what consequences her book had on the family whose basic human friendlieness she had misused. It is interesting to watch how people like her functions, journalists. (We have lots of the same kind of journalists in Sweden, it is no special norwegian desease.) It is something about being a journalist. They do this again and again. One might wonder why?

2 comments:

anne said...

One reason I think the book is so interesting is the controversy it's generated. The author has stood by the accuracy of her work and denies having done anything wrong. I'll try to bring some articles about the dispute to the meeting.

anne said...
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